Chrome

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About

Chrome is by far my favorite browser! Google Chrome was designed to be lightweight, and when it was released in December 2008 it blew other browsers out of the water in terms of application loading and page loading time, and a minimal interface which combined search and URL into a single bar. It forced all other browsers to improve their performance and rethink design. Such was the Chromes intent - even if you prefer another browser, it has been made better by the existence of Chrome.

On this page are a few tips of fantastic Chrome features you might not know about.

Multiple Chrome Profiles By Adding "Users"

Even if you don't have multiple users, Chrome's "User Settings" can be useful to create separate "profiles" to separate your "work" and "home" (each with potentially different bookmarks/extensions/settings).

To do this:

Log out of all accounts, and log into just your home gmail.

Click the Chrome menu icon > Settings then "Add New User".

Create a new user called "Work" and give appropriate icon (eg: ninja). When this new window opens (with your soccer ball icon), log in to desired Google account (in my case my home gmail), and it will sync with your settings for that account.

You can now switch between "Users" (each in a different window) by clicking the icon at the top left of Chrome (NOTE: Chrome on mac no longer shows icon sadly, so it will be text at top right). Click back to your first profile.

Go back to menu > Settings and there should be two users. Modify the original one (select and hit "Edit") - call it "Home", give it a different icon (eg: soccer ball).

The icon will now show what account you are in, so now you can simply stay logged into your home gmail (only) in one user profile, and the work gmail in the other. Since they both have different settings, I like to pin my gmail as the first tab in both account and the icon makes it easy to switch between checking home and work email.

Pin Tab Feature

Right click a tab and select "pin tab". This tab will move to the front with a small icon. Best of all, if you close the browser and open, the pinned tabs remain. I like to pin a gmail tab and calendar, in that order, and I can then switch to them at any time with shortcut keys [ctrl]+[1] / [ctrl]+[2].

HTML inspection with the "Developer Tools" Window

If you are a web designer, Chrome's HTML in place HTML editing and JavaScript console are hard to beat. You can access this via menu icon > More Tools > Developer Console. A better way to open this, however, is with:

[ctrl][shift][c]

Try it now! Then click on any element on the page and it will jump to that "Element" in code - and show you the CSS styles applied. Here you can edit the styles or the HTML directly to see the effect it has! If you are debugging Javascript, click "Console" and you can type the name of any variable and it will show you the value, and/or show you any errors which occur. It's brilliant. The other tabs can be useful to see what page elements are loading and how fast. This is an absolute dream for developers!

Just a fun side story... since you can edit any page in place, it can be fun to take an official page and change the text to something silly (eg: change text on Wikipedia or the republican website to say that George Bush is being cast as a Muppet in an upcoming movie), then hide the console and then show it to a friend. They will probably buy it. Just don't hit refresh - because then your edits disappear. :-)